Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by janejeon 1052 days ago
This seems like yet another ERC-20 stablecoin with no special "quirks", from a quick reading. My question is, what is the reason for this to exist over existing stablecoins that have much broader acceptance and long history (for crypto anyway), e.g. USDC/USDT?
5 comments

Oh, they exist so they can throw their peg and crash losing 99 percent of their value while the company or individuals responsible tell their users not to worry and that it is totally under control.
for a company like this, the real reason is because you can give users 0% return while on the backend actually making return with their money, same as any "bank" that holds usd.

for people like do kwon and sbf, and many others I probably don't know about, what you said

> same as any "bank" that holds usd

Banks are competing for deposits; this rate pressure is already hitting earnings. And they take maturity-transformation risk. PayPal has found ersatz depositors without depositor protections who will accept zero yield in a high-yield environment. They could literally just roll into Treasury bills and overnight funding and ink a decent profit.

Kind of depends on PayPal’s implementation details, but it’s still quite painful to transfer assets between web3 and the traditional financial system. If it’s easy to transfer pyusd from PayPal to a private ethereum wallet and vice versa, it could potentially be an easier way to move usd in and out of crypto.

Of course this probably won’t happen for regulatory reasons, and even if it does pyusd may have the same type of blacklisting that prevents many dapps from using usdc.

So someone else can make a ton of money by manipulating and artificial and most importantly unregulated market. IE why cryptocurrency exists at all.
That's not why it exists. It's why there are so many scams.
Utility. PayPal claims they will allow payments to be done in this if the user wants to. Let's say someone holds 20 PYUSD and he reaches the checkout page of an item costing $10. He should be able to use 10 PYUSD to buy that item. PayPal will also allow free conversion between PYUSD and PayPal balance. So crypto folks finally have something that can actually be used IRL.
Easy on and off ramp to paypal? Thus existing solely for benefit of paypal.

Paypal getting their cut from crypto market and spenders there... Maybe some crypto-users thinking that them trading for these coins and then using them to buy stuff is finally real world adoption...